Getting Ready for Spring Concert

It is May – and the school is blossoming with music! The students are polishing the skills they learned in music classes.  If you visit any music class, at first glance it may look the same as how we started the year.  That is because we engage familiar routines but grow the sophistication of the work in each part of the routine as the students develop skills. 

If you look closely now, you will see that: 

• The students are singing with a unified tone
• The students are moving in sync
• The students are singing with more robust sound
• The students are confidently performing part works.  This means that each student is doing multiple parst to a song – such as:
  • singing and signing
  • singing and improvising
  • singing and playing body percussion
  • singing and playing an instrument
  • or singing in canon/two-part harmony
• The students are doing music literacy work (or pre-literacy work in the case of kindergarten)
• The students are singing, dancing, playing musical games, and performing dances independently

We also started to think about and rehearse for our annual Spring Concert in music classes. The Lower School Spring Concert is what we would call an open music class. Here is what you can expect:

We will gather in the gym and share our learnings with the community.  You will hear our favorite songs and singing games from each class, see us move and dance, and showcase literacy skills and musical skills. In the audience, older students look back at the younger grades and remember the fun they had when they were little. They also look up to the older students proudly sharing their musical learnings and feel challenged to achieve more.

I hope you can join us at the Lower School Spring Concert! The concert is on Friday, May 19, at 2:00 pm in the gym. We hope you can join us, all families and friends are invited!

(This post is written by Aiko Mauldin, Music Teacher Grades K-5.)